The edible-type cones used for ice cream including the so-called cake cones and sugar cones, are quite fragile. In order to minimize damage to such fragile edible-type cones, it is a common practice to provide an upright cone magazine having a dispensing outlet with resilient cone retaining fingers at the lower end of the stack for supporting the stack of cones in an upright position for gravity feed to the dispensing outlet. The edible-type cones are light weight and the overall weight of a verticle stack of such cones to be dispensed is relatively low and generally less than one pound. The resilient cone retaining fingers at the lower end of the vertical stack of cones only have to be made stiff enough to releasably retain the end cone in the stack with a low cone retaining force sufficient to support the weight of the stack of light weight cones. Thus, in the vertical-type edible cone dispensers, the end cone at the lower end of the stack can be manually grasped and withdrawn through the dispensing outlet without damaging the cone. While such vertical cone dispensers operate satisfactorily to dispense the fragile edible-type cones without damaging the cones, there are some installations where, because of space limitations and the like, the use of a vertical cone dispenser is not desired.
It has also been proposed to provide horizontal cup dispensers. The cup dispensers with which the applicant is aware utilize a horizontal cup guide having a dispensing outlet at one end with resilient cup engaging fingers around the dispensing outlet, and a coil-type compression spring in the horizontal guide for advancing the stack of cups toward the dispensing outlet. The cups are generally loaded into the guide by pushing them in a reverse direction through the resilient cup engaging fingers at the dispensing outlet while simultaneously compressing the spring in the guide. The force exerted by the compression spring increases with the length of the stack of cups and the resilient retaining fingers at the dispensing outlet must be selected to provide a sufficiently high cup retaining force to prevent ejecting of the cups when the dispenser is loaded with a full stack of cups and the spring is in its maximum compressed condition. Plastic and paper cups are relatively flexible and durable and can withstand the relatively high forces exerted on the stack by the coil-type compression spring and the correspondingly high cup retaining forces which must be exerted by the resilient cup retaining fingers on the end cup in such horizontal cup dispensers. However, when an attempt was made to dispense fragile edible-type cones in such a horizontal cup dispenser having a coil-type compression spring for advancing the stack of cones it was found that an undesirable amount of breaking, cracking, chipping and flaking occurred of the cones during loading and dispensing of the end cones.